Dev Log | Team Updates, Backer Rewards, Platforms!

Attention Jumpers!

It’s been a long time since our last transmission. We’re still here. We appreciate your loyalty to the H.S.A. and our effort to reclaim the planet from the alien scum. Read on to hear news from the front lines!

The Team

Backer Rewards

Current Platforms (PC and Wii U)

New Platforms (WHAT’S IT GONNA BE?!)

The Team

Over the last year, our Hive Jump team has gone through some changes. Several members of the team have moved on to new challenges and new adventures outside of Graphite Lab. Each remains connected to Hive Jump in spirit, but simply can’t devote full time effort to the game. Remaining team members at Graphite Lab have been diligent in moving our day-to-day work forward (gotta keep the lights on) while juggling our commitment to Hive Jump. You may have read about our business model on Gamasutra; it’s taken a lot of fuel to keep Hive Jump moving along, but we’re getting there.

Our recent progress has been made possible through some new partnerships. While not full time at Graphite, Artist Cameron Samimi (@camsamtweets) has been helping design our art book. Its looking great and I’m happy to report we shared our draft with the printer earlier today to determine some logistics with printing.

Programmer Jordan Schlechte is new to the indie game dev scene. After a time with Riot Games, Jordan now works with the Hive Jump team under his studio banner Wooden Anchor Games. Located here in St. Louis, Jordan’s role is leading expansion into *ahem* new territory with Hive Jump, which we’ll talk about later in this post.

But first, some updates on past matters.

Backer Rewards

You may be asking yourself “Captain, when am I going to get my sweet loot?!” Soon soldier. We’re making progress. We’ve grown our art book from a puny 30 pager to over 60 glorious pages of Hive Jump art work. Its jam packed with over 100 illustrations including some that never materialized into working game versions.

Full color and glossy, this “Art & Origins” edition will be yours shortly.

We’ve also worked up more additions to the coloring book reward. Everyone in the applicable tiers should receive digital versions of these items in the next few weeks. Past that, we’ll get on to the rest of the items, sharing digital designs with you first, and then on to shipping the physical goods.

Bust out the Crayola’s – this pic needs colorin’

For a quick-read status update on all things physical, look below!

Progress on Art Book, Coloring Book and More!

Current Platforms

We’ve got some clean up to do on PC. In our efforts to bring Hive Jump to new platforms, we’ve done a little clean up, overall, to the game. We’ve invested time toward improving game elements such as the collision system and some basic bug fixing. There were some questions about certain achievements which we’ve worked to clear up and some other “behind the scenes” optimizations to tackle. We’ve learned of a few new bugs about controller detection which we’ve got in the bug queue.

About Re-bindable Controls, on all platforms… I know it’s not natural to have the jump button on a shoulder button. Decades of other titles demand that we jump with a face button. I get it. But, if you put it anywhere else you can’t jump, aim and shoot well. We’ve tried. Its not a feature that is completely off the table, but we’ve not found a config that works better so we chose to prioritize other tasks. If you want to try out different configurations on PC in the meantime, tools like JoytoKey do offer that type of support.

A few of you were asking about controller maps in the Steam forums so we’ve whipped up a few quick guides:

Online Multiplayer is not a system that is easily perfected. It works great in some cases, but in others it suffers from desyncs and performance issues. We’ve invested considerable time toward making this experience better for everyone, but issues still come up. We’ve had to be a bit pragmatic in choosing ways to move Hive Jump forward and aren’t yet in a spot where we can take that beta tag off the Online Feature.

Wii U has a few issues that are present. We spent a long time trying to work out an update for that pesky chest crash which appeared after release. There were some reports of getting stuck in the levels, too. Some of our improvements for future platforms may have helped those items. However, in order to test that, we’ll need to get access to Wii U development hardware again as those items were on temporary loan to our team. Stay tuned.

What about bringing Wii U to the EU? We’ve discussed the EU related delays with many of you individually. Most have switched to a PC key. For the few that have not, we want to find a way to get you a copy of Hive Jump, but it doesn’t look like Wii U in the EU will be possible. We do have steam keys which we can share. Hit us up at info@hivejump.com and we’ll get you hooked up. You may be excited to hold out for a future platform code, unfortunately, we don’t have free ability to generate those keys (like we do with Steam) thus, we don’t have the availability to offer our backers these codes without additional cost. In any case, if you are a Wii U EU backer – drop us a note. We’ll do the best we can to make you a happy jumper.

New Platforms

So, we saved the best news for last hoping that we could announce new platforms for Hive Jump today. What is tricky about announcing any new platform(s) is that we need to give our partners ample time to weigh in on our plans. It sucks to wait, but we’ve not yet gotten those approvals and can’t yet announce where we are headed next. That said, I think you will be happy with the results. Choosing to share the items above was a fair compromise, I suppose.